A System of Play

The objects that surround me have accumulated over the years. Some have a fixed purpose and my hand reaches for them at specific times. Dust doesn’t tend to settle on these. Others live high up on shelves, between an armchair and a bookshelf, placed between a door and a radiator, balanced on the edge of a chair – these objects tend to move less, if at all.They surround me and they inhabit space - a constellation of forms and colours. A strange and disparate ecosystem, learnt contours and corresponding gestures through which my limbs and thoughts continuously navigate.

Moving home in the summer of 2017 reminded me of this seemingly random amalgamation – dislodging shapes placed one by one in cardboard boxes, impervious to any selective ordering, bearers of talismanic properties that prevented me from disposing of them.

A System of Play considers this accumulation and excess of household objects and consumables and their singular interaction and dialogue with the body and self, but also the feeling of self-erasure that can arise from overconsumption. Isolating these objects from their habitual space or functionality, they become props, function-less, awkwardly balanced or fused in a mutual cohabitation, extensions of the body, an ambivalent interaction of shapes and forms that support, constrain and conceal.